“It’s too trite to say that time will heal all wounds. These wounds are part of us now, but they don’t have to define our future.”
—Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, Dominique Smith & John Hattie
For more than a year now, we educators have been tested and tested again. We’ve been stretched, we’ve been pulled, we’ve been put through the wringer. But now it’s time to “rebound.” It’s time to bounce back, come back better, and benefit from the many lessons learned to reignite engagement, accelerate learning, and move forward with fresh optimism and better systems for schooling.
Enter Doug Fisher, Nancy Frey, Dominique Smith, and John Hattie, whose Distance Learning Playbooks have supported more than a half million educators across pandemic teaching and who are here now to advise you on this next, absolutely critical leg of our ongoing journey.
Complete with tools and strategies, prompts and exercises, Rebound: A Playbook for Rebuilding Agency, Accelerating Learning Recovery, and Rethinking Schools will help you:
- Address the collective traumas we have experienced during the pandemic and rebuild our sense of agency and self, so that we can attribute student success to both teachers’ and students’ efforts
- Evaluate what we have learned about remote teaching and learning to determine what to carry forward and what to leave behind
- Shift the narrative from learning loss to “learning leaps” and implement instructional and assessment practices that ensure our students reclaim lost knowledge, build skills, develop agency, and accelerate gains
- Redefine classrooms, learning experiences, the ways schools operate, and the very idea of schooling itself
“The greatest travesty that can arise for schools after 2020/21,” Doug, Nancy, Dominique, and John write, “is to rush back to the old normal, and learn nothing, or little, about what worked well. That’s why this book has focused on rebounding, and taking the opportunity to create an even better schooling system, one that serves even more students, and focuses more on what matters most.”
Douglas Fisher, Ph.D., is Professor and Chair of Educational Leadership at San Diego State University and a leader at Health Sciences High & Middle College having been an early intervention teacher and elementary school educator. He is the recipient of an International Reading Association William S. Grey citation of merit, an Exemplary Leader award from the Conference on English Leadership of NCTE, as well as a Christa McAuliffe award for excellence in teacher education. He has published numerous articles on reading and literacy, differentiated instruction, and curriculum design as well as books, such as PLC+: Better Decisions and Greater Impact by Design, Building Equity, and The Distance Learning Playbook.
Nancy Frey, Ph.D., is a Professor in Educational Leadership at San Diego State University and a leader at Health Sciences High and Middle College. She has been a special education teacher, reading specialist, and administrator in public schools. Nancy has engaged in Professional Learning Communities as a member and in designing schoolwide systems to improve teaching and learning for all students. She has published numerous books, including The Teacher Clarity Playbook and The Distance Learning Playbook.
Dominique Smith is a social worker, school administrator, mentor, national trainer for the International Institute on Restorative Practices, member of ASCD’s FIT Teaching (Framework for Intentional and Targeted Teaching®) Cadre and Corwin’s Visible Learning for Literacy Cadre. He is passionate about creating school cultures that honor students and build their confidence and competence. He is the winner of the National School Safety Award from the School Safety Advocacy Council. Dominique’s major area of research and instruction focuses on restorative practices, classroom management, growth mindset, and the culture of achievement. He earned his master’s degree in social work from the University of Southern California and is a doctoral student in educational leadership at San Diego State University.
John Hattie, Ph.D., is an award-winning education researcher and best-selling author with nearly 30 years of experience examining what works best in student learning and achievement. His research, better known as Visible Learning, is a culmination of nearly 30 years synthesizing more than 1,500 meta-analyses comprising more than 90,000 studies involving over 300 million students around the world. He has presented and keynoted in over 350 international conferences and has received numerous recognitions for his contributions to education. His notable publications include Visible Learning, Visible Learning for Teachers, Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn, Visible Learning for Mathematics, Grades K-12, and, most recently, 10 Mindframes for Visible Learning.